Hotel de Dream (2 page)

“Hilda! What is it? Something … bad seems to have happened out there.” He waved in the direction of the front of the house. Hilda Poynter smiled. Mr Poynter did not like her smile, it was wild and rather vulgar, showing more teeth than he had seen revealed in a long and happy married life together. Then tears began to fall. He shook her embroidered shoulders roughly.

“Look, Richard.” She pointed to the floor. On the area of dove-grey carpet by the French window lay a thin film of sand. She went up to it, then hung back, afraid to put her foot down in the substance.

“What on earth do you think you're doing with that stuff in here?” Poynter kicked at the sand and it flew at his immaculate boots, giving all at once a scruffy, dressed-up look to his general's uniform. Hilda Poynter wept and clung to his arm.

“A woman came in here, Richard, through there. Through the window. She was—enormous.”

Poynter turned and looked at his wife closely. His eyes flickered to the mother-of-pearl tray where a bottle of sweet sherry stood, in the event of callers. The glasses, upside down and highly polished, showed no sign of interference.

“An enormous woman,” he said in a flat tone. “And did the girls see her, Hilda? And why, may I ask, should she bring this muck in with her?”

“She was naked.” Hilda Poynter gesticulated vaguely, her puffed muslin sleeves flying out as she sketched a gigantic form in the air. “Long hair … great legs … oh Richard, I can't tell you!”

“And she came in through the window.” Poynter sat down stiffly on a pristine sofa. “She was covered in sand, then?”

“Yes, yes she was. She stood glaring at me a moment and then she ran off again over the lawn. I know I should have
called the servants, but …” Here Hilda Poynter's voice tailed off. Her husband had a dead, remote look on his face, as if he had failed to hear what she had said or, if he had, had no intention of taking it seriously.

“Get the stuff cleared up then, my dear. And where are the girls? Has Clemmy made preparations for the ball tonight? Her dress, is that ready? And what about the flowers?”

At the mention of the ball, a blue light crept back into Hilda Poynter's eyes and she gave a tremulous smile.

“You think … I sort of dreamt it, Richard? I mean, perhaps the heat …”—(Mr Poynter's temperature did not suit his wife)—“and all the excitement about tonight.” She gazed at him hopefully. Poynter rose and clicked his heels together. He looked down on his wife's smooth hair and patted the wimple, which rose like the horn of a unicorn from the back of her head.

“I expect so, Hilda.” He took his gold timepiece from the pocket of his uniform. “You'll have to give the girls my love today, I'm afraid. Affairs of state.” He marched to the door, eyes averted from the sandy patch by the French window, and out into the hall. It was only when he reached the bright sunlight of the front garden that he became aware again of the condition of his boots; and he trotted at unaccustomed speed to the white Rolls and the waiting chauffeur.

The car carried Mr Poynter back to his palace. As he arrived in the main square and the piper on the roof began his slow, lugubrious welcome, a loud pounding sounded in Mr Poynter's ears. He looked around to see if target practice was going on in the artillery field by the west wing. There was no sign of anyone, but the pounding continued. The car stopped, Mr Poynter waited for the chauffeur to come round and let him out. He stretched out his hand as the door opened. It came down on a sharp wooden surface, his head swam and dots appeared before his eyes.

“Tea, Mr Poynter.” The pounding died away, and Mrs
Routledge's voice receded down the passage of the Westringham Hotel. Mr Poynter tossed uneasily in his bed, and woke.

“Tea, Miss Scranton.” A muffled hammering, on the door of the adjacent room, No. 22. Mr Poynter looked up at the stained curtains that let in, however hard he tweaked them together, the phlegm-coloured light of a London morning. At the patch of lino under the basin, chewed at the edges by the dog of a previous resident, the dark oblongs on the walls where mezzotints had hung before Mrs Routledge took them off to her brother-in-law to be sold. Tea! He struggled to a sitting position, his thin yellow legs came out of the bed and his feet went into slippers. Carefully, he dressed to go downstairs.

In Room 22, Jeannette Scranton dreamed she was on the edge of a vast beach. She was naked, and carried the big brown carpet-bag she took with her wherever she went—to staff-room meetings, downstairs to tea at the Westringham even—and she could tell from its weight that it contained its usual load of unmarked exercise books, exotic make-up that was seldom used, and the bundles of letters from the lecturer in linguistics who had once said that he was going to marry her. It was hot, and the sand was pleasantly firm beneath her bare feet. At the far end of the beach, where groves of olive trees came down to the sea and a large, black cave stood like an open mouth against the blue sky, she could just make out what seemed to be a long hut and figures moving round it. She was relaxed—for the first time in years, she felt there was no particular hurry, no need to be in time for a lesson or to run for the bus before the rush hour started. She strolled along, the bag dangling against her thin haunches and the wavelets at her feet coming in and out gently as the sound of her own breath.

The walk to the hut seemed to take a long time, but Jeannette felt no fatigue. She was surprised, as she drew near, to see that the building was higher than she had expected: walls of plaited reeds went up to about twenty feet and supported a roof of olive branches, some freshly cut and with the leaves and small black fruit still on them. The women, too—and here Jeannette slowed her pace, and looked down at her own body to regain a sense of the proportion of things, appeared to be roughly double her height. They carried
shields over great breasts that were thick with sand, and their legs, encrusted too so that they looked as if they had been dipped in gold dust, were as straight and solid as the trunks of trees. They had long, matted hair of a reddish colour and large, bright eyes with which they appeared to relay messages to each other; Jeannette saw, even before she had come right up to them, that a glinting eye from one woman would cause another to go off into the grove behind the hut and return with branches, and that in the stream of light that flowed from their orbs there was complete understanding, love and sympathy. As far as Jeannette could see, there was no leader in the group, yet there was a sense of collective will-power as these creatures went about their daily tasks which suggested that they were preparing for something—a war, perhaps, or an important feast.

A handful of children, the same size as Jeannette in fact, but clearly not more than five or six years old, were collected at the entrance to the hut. They had what appeared to be blue paint smeared on their faces and were playing with an outsize ball made of plaited reed like the walls behind them. Jeannette saw they were all female. One of them pointed to her and took a step forward. Large black eyes looked into hers. Jeannette felt a message, inquisitive but not aggressive, sensed an optic nerve twitch in recognition, but nevertheless smiled politely and held out her hand.

“I'm Miss Scranton. Now any of you who want anything just come to me and explain your problem. Nothing to be frightened of, you know.” She twinkled and rummaged in her bag for sweets and coloured crayons she always carried with her at the beginning of a new term. The children's laughter beamed out of their eyes at her and she stood a moment at a loss, a red pentel grasped in her right hand and a boiled sweet half way out of the bag, ready for the conciliatory offering. One of the giantesses came up from behind the hut and stood staring at Jeannette. The others, she saw, were plunging into the water together as if at some pre-
arranged signal: their brown buttocks rose and fell like the backs of dolphins in the sea, their hair streamed out behind them. Jeannette's interlocutor stood hands on hips, the sun glinting from her breastplate and turning it to a third, more monstrous eye. Jeannette looked up at the stern face. Her legs began to tremble beneath her. It seemed to her that she was being invited to join the group, but without ceremony or welcome. She thought of the rain-spattered days in the school playground at home, her room at the Westringham with the photograph of her mother on the chest of drawers, and the frown of pity on Mrs Routledge's face when she looked in at the paucity of Miss Scranton's possessions, and hesitated. There was something compelling about this invitation, a sense that she had been wandering unknown and unregarded in the wrong world and that she had come to her haven at last, quite by mistake and quite calmly, a haven she could have entered at any time but for some reason was available to her for the first time now. All the same—she glanced at the cave and the rocky promontory that led out from it into the sea, the sporting women and the curious, open-faced children—how could she know she would be really safe here, that this wasn't yet another trap, like the time Miss Marchison had said they would be friends for ever and then turned on her after only a week, making her a figure of fun in the staff-room and avoiding her in the corridors as if she bore the mark of some unmentionable social leprosy?

The woman stretched out a hand and took hold of Jeannette's arm with thick fingers the colour of baked earth. She drew her down towards the sea and gave a playful push. Hearing the laughter of the other women ringing in her ears, Jeannette sank gratefully into warm salty water, and her bag floated away from her and down to the white pebbles of the sea bed. She began to swim, at first with the awkward breast-stroke she herself taught in the school baths, and then with the rounded, rhythmic motions of the women. She
dived and bobbed, rising to the surface to find their eyes shining out at her above the waves. They laughed, but without making any sound, and Jeannette's mouth slackened in response, the polite, defeated smile disappearing from her face and replaced by a great cavernous silent laugh, the sea slopping in and out of her mouth and her jaws and teeth aching. When the women, again after a message had flashed between them that was too quick for Jeannette to understand at once, began to make their way to the shore, she followed hastily. When they reached the beach, she rolled in the sand with them and like some survivor from a smaller, paler race, stood amongst their flanks awaiting the next signal.

The sun showed no sign of moving in the sky, but after what seemed a few hours or a few days, Jeannette had become the mascot of the Amazons. They showed her a trophy that one of them, the tallest and most warlike of the troupe, had brought back from a recent foray to a distant land. It was square and transparent, and a picture of a pointed object was crudely painted on it, and Jeannette, with the faint memories that still remained in her of her previous life, tried to convey to them that this was where people in the other world placed ash when they had smoked, and that the pointed object was a building somewhere, she could not remember where, which was much admired and photographed. The women laughed and shrugged and replaced the glassy thing on a rough table in the long hut. They showed little curiosity about Jeannette, yet she felt she was there for some purpose and that they would make use of her one day on an important mission. While they indoctrinated her into their rituals of worship—at night, in the moonlight, around a tree stump garlanded with anemones and olive leaves, and prepared her for the day of mating by rubbing ointments on her body and hammering out her breastplate for her, Jeannette also felt that their idyllic life was coming to an end and that knowing it, they had ordered her to be sent to them.

The mating rite was in the hills, two days' walk from the women's hut. They told Jeannette that they would meet the men there from the far plains and drink and couple with them when the moon was full. Children would be conceived, the males left in the olive grove to die, and the females reared to swell their ranks. It was clear that the rite seldom took place, because a new atmosphere made itself felt as the time drew nearer: scorn and excitement showed on the women's faces and Jeannette felt some of her old nervousness returning, reminding her of the days when her mother had forced her to go to parties given by her friends for their children, and no one had asked her to dance. She started sleeping badly and would wake muttering in the night, the unaccustomed sounds from her throat bringing a powerful, comforting hand from a recumbent figure beside her. She knew, as the others seemed to, that this was to be the last of such encounters, and if she passed the test she would bear, as they all had, a child for the continuation of their race. As the day approached, her flesh tingled under the carapace of sand and she moved more freely, copying the wide confident stride of the women.

They set off in the early morning when the sea was still dark and the sun was touching the tops of the distant hills. They walked slowly, pausing to eat and drink and pray. After two nights, they had climbed through the scrub of the foothills and arrived on a plateau, protected like an amphitheatre by the mountains. They made camp and lit a fire. Because they were away from the sea, it was very quiet when night fell and Jeannette felt, for the first time since she had been with them, a frantic desire to hear the sound of a human voice. The women had stopped laughing, too, and their eyes were clouded and their faces solemn as they prepared themselves for the ritual.

The first sign of the men's coming was like wind in the trees on the surrounding hills. The women sat in a semicircle round the fire and looked up at the invisible horizon and
then at each other. Jeannette heard horses and loud singing: pinpricks of light from the men's flares came in a straight line now across the plateau towards them. She shifted restlessly and a score of frowning eyes stilled her. The horses' hooves drummed on the parched grass.

“Tea, Miss Scranton.”